Canada at 150: Canada 'crippled' says Greg Malone

Richard Foot, Ottawa Citizen12.29.2012

Greg Malone has written a surprising story about how the fate of Newfoundland was plotted by the British and Canadian governments without consideration for the opinions of the people who live on the island.

The 150th birthday of Confederation is now less than five years away. Postmedia News offers a special series on how the country should mark the occasion. This story is part of the Canada at 150 series. Read more at ottawacitizen.com/ Canada150

Greg Malone has some choice words for Confederation, and few are polite enough to publish. About the only one that's fit to print is "crippled."

The Newfoundland author, and former CODCO comedy star, says the country he once entertained on television - with his hilarious impersonations of the Queen and CBC host Barbara Frum - is a "crippled nation" in need of a new beginning.

"Central Canada never had any vision to build up the East Coast any more than they did the West," he says. "People in the West had to barge and storm their way in when they had enough economic clout to do so.

"The only paradigm for Canada was: take the resources from the regions and build up the heartland. That's not good enough. We need a different kind of Confederation where everyone feels genuinely equal and genuinely committed to it, and then I think we'd have some kind of country to work with."

Malone is the latest torch bearer of Newfoundland nationalism, thanks to his new, bestselling book about how his province was, he says, "fraudulently" brought into Canada against its will.

He is a potent reminder that separatist fires still smoulder not only in Quebec, but in English-speaking Canada too.

As the country begins preparing for its 150th birthday celebrations five years from now, it's worth remembering that not everyone will be joining the party. There were crowds of anti-Confederates in English Canada back in 1867, and there remain pockets of them today, convinced that Canada hasn't been good for all of its parts and peoples.

Although the idea of Canada was "born," historians say, at the Charlottetown Conference in 1864, the notion was vehemently opposed at the time by many in the self-governing Atlantic colonies - where strains of anti-Confederate sentiment have never been fully snuffed out.

Nova Scotia's most revered historical figure, journalist and politician Joseph Howe, campaigned against Confederation in the 1860s and tried to have the British North America Act repealed in Westminster after it was passed. Prince Edward Island rejected Confederation at first, only joining Canada six years later, thanks in part to the steep debts it incurred during the 1870s in the construction of an Island railway that its government couldn't afford.

While there is disappointment in Confederation in P.E.I., there is palpable anger in parts of Newfoundland and Labrador, and its latest manifestation is Greg Malone's new book Don't Tell the Newfoundlanders.

The book, which sold out quickly in Newfoundland and had to be reprinted, details the history of the province's entry into Confederation in 1949. It breathes new life into a long-held suspicion among many Newfoundlanders that their "country" was illegally made part of Canada against the wishes of its people, by a secret British-Canadian conspiracy.

It's been known for years, through archival documents, that British and Canadian officials did quietly conspire to manipulate both political negotiations, and public opinion, to bring about union between Newfoundland and Canada. What Malone argues - but what the evidence fails to show - is that there was actual, criminal, vote-rigging by the pro-Confederation side in the 1948 referendum that approved union by a narrow 52 per cent.

Either way, Malone says he hopes the book will psychologically "liberate" Newfoundlanders from what he calls the "negative propaganda" heaped on its people since 1949: that Canada was the financial saviour of a pauper province - "all set up to make Canada look good and cover the smell of what it was really doing."

Malone is the latest in a long line of activists to argue that Newfoundlanders governed their own territory for 100 years before joining Canada, and should consider doing so again, especially now that the province has the oil wealth to make its economy tick.

"Now that we're rolling in the cash it may be time to consider breaking away from the country of Canada," wrote Ryan Cleary, former editor of the Independent, a St. John's newspaper, in 2008. Cleary is now an NDP MP.

Jeff Webb, a pro-Confederation history professor at Memorial University, says strains of separatist thinking in Newfoundland have evolved over the decades. After 1949 they were fuelled by a sense of betrayal among those who'd once lived in an independent Newfoundland, who believed that union with Canada was brought about undemocratically and should be overturned. Those advocates are now mostly gone.

The postwar generation, says Webb, was motivated less by anger at Confederation itself than by its experience being treated as second-class citizens within Canada.

"I went to university in New Brunswick," he says, "and I was regularly reminded that I was stupider than the other students. I regularly had people say things to me like, 'Oh you're from Newfoundland, perform like a buffoon for me.' Or, 'It must be such a big adjustment for you to be living on the mainland.'

"For many in my generation, part of our nationalism was not political, it was wanting respect, feeling that we were being discriminated against."

But Webb says the newest generation of young adults in Newfoundland has little sense of betrayal or victimhood, having experienced neither the union debates of the 1940s, nor the trauma of the fishery collapse, nor much old-fashioned "Newfie" stereotyping.

"These students are all on the Internet, all on Facebook. They are a generation whose mental world is not local, but global."

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